


I'm with you in Rockland

by pangaeaseas



Category: Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy, Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Adultery, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Death makes you kinda crazy, Everyone is Dead, Female Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, I never really explain what exactly Helene is but she's a ghost, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Insanity, Literary References & Allusions, Magical Realism, Mental Health Issues, Metafiction, One-sided Conversation, POV Female Character, Parent-Child Relationship, Period-Typical Sexism, Prose Poem, Sad Ending, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Talking, a little bit of internalized misogyny, a little of it anyway, by which I mean prose poem-y monologue thing, of both Anna and Helene, referenced a bit, referenced between Anna and Seryozha, tolstoy references (duh), who appears in the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:09:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24426304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pangaeaseas/pseuds/pangaeaseas
Summary: Trains, candles, what happens after death or maybe just the voices in your head. Society ladies and the similarities between them. Children, or the lack thereof. Run-on sentences and if death makes you crazy. Lovers and husbands and foreign languages and drugs and whether one should get married. A pep talk, except too late and more like a monologue.Oh Anna, your candle is flickering but I do not have to tell you that. Who am I? A question, good, of the inane sort you so despise, and I once so loved, because you have to be good at inane questions to be good in society, and there was nothing but society for me. I’m Helene Kuragin, Countess Bezukhova, Yelena Vasilievna, one thousand separate names each with their own ways of classifying me like a specimen in a cabinet. Call me Helene or Ellen, because I was born in the wrong country and I can hardly even make my mouth form Russian words, nor do I want it to. Oh, and I’m dead.All adulteresses go mad and kill themselves.Or, Helene Kuragin appears to Anna Karenina as she's on the train platform.
Relationships: Anna Karenina & Elena "Helene" Vasilyevna Kuragina
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	I'm with you in Rockland

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," taken so far out of context that it hopefully swivels around to be a bit contexty again? Please heed the tags if you're part of what I'm sure will be the tiny audience of this.

Oh Anna, your candle is flickering but I do not have to tell you that. Who am I? A question, good, of the inane sort you so despise, and I once so loved, because you have to be good at inane questions to be good in society, and there was nothing but society for me. I’m Helene Kuragin, Countess Bezukhova, Yelena Vasilievna, one thousand separate names each with their own ways of classifying me like a specimen in a cabinet. Call me Helene or Ellen, because I was born in the wrong country and I can hardly even make my mouth form Russian words, nor do I want it to. Oh, and I’m dead. You’ve heard of me, because I think you should, you are nodding your head like a sycophant. Yes, you are a good man, Count Bezukhov, a fine man, a handsome man, my daughter loves you, why don’t you marry her, Count Bezukhov? Why don’t you marry him, Helene, he will be good to you, he will be rich for you, Helene, everything you could ever need except love and no one ever wants that.

You think I’m insane, Anna, but by necessity the dead are, our minds are as thin and weak as a single flame of a candle, except not the flame, but the image of the light once it has been snuffed. I am not making sense, because I’m mixing metaphors, mine and yours, and they don’t quite fit over each other. It’s like a conversion half-completed. Anna, you wonder how I know your name, which is Anna Arkadyevna, Madame Karenin, and you’ll never be Anna Vronsky, because you are going to kill yourself, and I would rather not do that, it’s so unseemly, the sight of your body (which is, after all, most of you) twisted beneath a train, you are a fine lady even if Kitty looks at you funny, and fine ladies do not bleed like soldiers on a battlefield. But I know your name because I want to know it. We are similar and not, you and I.

I wonder how much opium you’ve taken, and morphine? I have my vices too. There is a certain emptiness in women, the space our corsets force out of our ribs. There is a space that needs to be filled, and isn’t that all we do, you and I? Fill spaces? Pierre and Dolokhov and Anatole and Boris and all of them could only see it and some of them didn’t even, they could never be enough to fill it. You have your drugs to dull your aching and your lover who you want desperately to be loved by. He loves you, see? I know the look of a man in love, I’ve seen it on my husband and my brother and pretty much all of my friends. You and I, we know how to make people fall in love with us, because there is an empty space called love and a thousand other things, and we keep trying to fill it in with sand and promises. He’s faithful to you and devoted to you and can’t understand you at all, is that so bad? No one could understand me. No one could satisfy me, they sated only my lust instead of my ambition, because part of ambition is a different kind of being beloved. My brother couldn’t even understand me. He was the stupider one and I was the smarter, except you’ll say we were both equally stupid as we both ended up dead, and he died for a cause at least and I killed myself trying to kill my child which I never had. At least you are smarter than your brother Stiva.

Don’t you miss your Seryozha? We are similar and different, you and I, and different because when I felt that mass inside of me I didn’t want it gone, I needed it gone. You love your Seryozha and you try to love Annie, and when I stopped bleeding and felt my stomach grow I had to run and throw up because I am not the sort of person who should be trusted with children. I am forever taking, never giving, forever climbing, never reaching the top of whatever mountain society is, or approval, or love, or something. And my body is my temple, my palace, my bank to be lent to those who ask for the best loans, I could not bear to have something foreign inside, taking what I’d never had. The child would have killed me more than it already did, it would have broken me open and stolen me away like prisoners let out of jail, I would never have loved it as I should because I cannot love when I need to be loved. I am half a prisoner anyway, a child would only fill in the missing bars on my jail cell. And I cannot hold onto things like you do a child, I toss everything away. Anna, you are not me, only a superimposed half of my image, you are frowning now because you love your children, even the one you cannot see you are always looking for. Anna, won’t you miss him? No, I am being to simple, and anyway I’ve talked mostly about myself because even in trying to save you I love myself best. I’m contradictory like that. 

And you are me, because all adulteresses go mad and kill themselves. You say I wasn’t mad, except I danced my way through balls and salons and theaters and operas, I danced with any man who would have me, danced so hard I wanted my feet to bleed like my body wasn’t doing, danced until I died, I danced like the world was a shining place brighter than a candle. And Anna, you are losing it too, whatever _it_ is, whatever sanity comes in a world that really ought to be crazy, you are so much more serious than me, except isn’t love a terrible thing to die for? You cannot bear it, so you get rid of it, except you love so badly you cannot cut it out and have to throw the whole endeavor of your life away. Don’t people stare at you in the theater? There are places you cannot go because you love more desperately than anyone, you loved so hard it became ugly to look at and no one likes an ugly woman. You’re beautiful and so am I, and we both hated our husbands. And God is good, except there aren’t enough serene peasants who love Jesus to meet us all at the end and convince us to live. Adultery is a sin and so all adulteresses go mad and kill themselves.

Anna, Anna, Anna, I wish you hadn’t gotten married, I wish I hadn’t gotten married, I wish no one ever got married. People like Natasha Rostov can get married all they want, but you and I are not suited for it. I was more the daughter of society than my parents, and you wished you were entirely love and not a creature of society and flesh, except you should wish so, you should not be in past tense already. I am in the past tense, because death is not life, it cannot change anything. If I could change anything I wouldn’t have gotten married, I would have run off to France or somewhere because hard Russian earth is not the fertile soil for me it was for my husband. I would have ruled the world, except I am or I was a woman, I could not do that, so I tried for only St. Petersburg and I ended up mostly hated instead. I wish I’d gotten the divorce I begged not to get. You wish you did too, except you think it still wouldn’t change the fact that you love too much, and you are right and wrong. I think you should not give up so quickly on happiness, stop wanting so much you can see the wanting and reaching and desperation. But what do I know? I used to want nothing but a man and a drink and a thousand eyes on me, and what did I get? What I wanted. And if I wanted more I changed the way it looked. You know exactly what you want and have no idea how to get it.

Don’t snuff your candle out. That is too quick. Don’t you think I wish I hadn’t taken those drugs, hadn’t put myself in a final bed, this time with death? I would have had a child and been probably an even worse parent than my own, lived in the absence of brother, perhaps gotten divorced quickly enough for my husband, at least, to be happy. He was happy anyway, but I don’t like him enough that I would give him happiness again at the price of my heartbeat. I sound insane, what with all that alliteration. Death makes you madder than you were, because you want even more because you’ve lost even more and I think I speak more in run-on sentences now because I never spoke my mind enough. What I want to say is I can wish all I want but wishing cannot undo what I’ve done. 

Death is no escape, Anna, you want to live. Your candle can flare brighter, I promise, you’ll see, except there is a train coming into the station now. Don’t do it, Anna. That train is going places I cannot see from the space of death. It could fill your empty spaces. You could get on it, Anna, ride straight to Seryozha, make Vronsky love you. I could get on it, make everyone love me, make someone know me, find Anatole alive again, find myself the one person in the whole world who I might not cheat on, find some satisfaction. You and I, we were always unsatisfied. Anna, you could get on the train and live, but you are past living, I see you already tried. I can only ask you not to throw yourself on the tracks, because fine society ladies are beautiful and death is not, and no one will approve of suicide and everyone will stare when they say your name anyway. No one will love a suicide, love is not the same as approval but isn’t it? I’ve lost my famous sharp mind in death, Anna, you will too. But you’re going to do it. The candle is going dark, and I’ve failed someone else because I’m the sort who never succeeded. I'm the sort of woman they tell stories about and not the sort who tells the stories.

**Author's Note:**

> If I made any egregious historical/plot errors, please comment to correct!


End file.
